At City Hall, homeowners call the tune
In municipalities across Ontario, candidates for local office are doing everything they can to reach voters before Election Day on Oct. 27. The campaign, which officially kicked off in January, is in the home stretch. By this point, candidates have knocked on hundreds of doors, shaken hands at summer festivals and block parties and spoken at countless community meetings and debates.
If you are a homeowner, however, your local candidates have likely been paying special attention to you. The reason for this is simple: Data from the General Social Survey, conducted annually by Statistics Canada, show that home- owners vote at much higher rates in municipal elections than renters. The gap is significant even after controlling for a variety of other factors known to influence voter turnout, including age, income and education. While the difference also exists in federal and provincial elections, it is particularly acute at the municipal level.
The reason for this is that homeowners have an incentive unique to municipal elections: For many, participation in local politics is the best way of protecting or enhancing the value of their homes. In economic terms, your home is your largest uninsurable asset. You can insure it against things like fire, flood and burglary, but not against the decisions of local politicians, which can significantly impact your bottom line. You cannot insure your home against tax increases, poor transportation planning or aesthetically displeasing development. If the city decides to move a trash dump across the street from the home you just purchased, you are very unlikely to maintain the value of your property, never mind turn a profit upon resale. Homeowners use their votes in municipal elections to protect themselves from such outcomes.
The difference between owners and renters is not limited to the ballot box. Outside of election season, homeowners are more likely than renters to volunteer for municipal or community boards, or to contact their councillor or other local officials.
Renters are obviously not completely disengaged in community life. Compared to owners, however, they enjoy a greater degree of mobility. If
Renters vote in fewer numbers, and have less of a voice as a result
the local politics of their community does not reflect their preferences, they can more easily relocate. The bottom line, therefore, is that homeowners have a greater financial incentive to become engaged in community life.
The disproportionate in- fluence of homeowners is important because their policy priorities and preferences differ from those of renters. They prioritize fiscal issues rather than social ones. They will vociferously defend neighbourhoods from policies they view as harmful to their property. In comparison to renters, they are much less supportive of social housing, and are opposed to government spending that does not have immediate positive implications for property values (such as neighbourhood beautification projects).
In Ottawa, for example, we have seen these divergent policy preferences manifested in the introduction of a formal candidate slate called the Property Owners. The group’s intention is to advance an agenda purported to be friendly to homeowners, and they use carefully crafted language to differentiate their interests from those of renters.
Even in the absence of formal candidate slates, however, homeowners control the municipal political agenda. Savvy politicians know that owners are much more likely to vote than renters, and they shape their platforms accordingly. Broadening the agenda to consider policies that do not disproportionately favour owners is a challenge, but not an impossible task. Voters should keep this in mind when examining candidates’ priorities during the home stretch of these campaigns.